Artifacts

According to this profile of Clive James and his supposedly mind-blowing website (I've visited it, and my mind has remained intact):

At the moment a hefty portion of Mr.James’s writing remains both in print and in demand, but he is keenly aware that literary culture is fighting a rear-guard battle against the artifacts of the ever-more ingenious technology of a new century.

Exactly what is this supposed to mean? "Literary culture" = print? This is finally what the "literary" comes down to? Printing words on pieces of paper? If I read, say, Yeats's "The Second Coming " on a computer screen I am thereby engaging in something less than the "literary" experience I would have if I read it on a piece of processed woodpulp? Isn't this patently absurd? (For that matter, if I read James's own essays on his website rather than seek them out in their original forms of (print) publication, am I missing something important about them? I hardly think so.)

Those who have invested a good deal of their time in publishing what they write on paper are apparently involved in a "rear-guard" battle with web publishing. (Such a battle isn't finally necessary, of course. Everyone involved could concede that both media have their useful purposes and could devote themselves to exploring their possibilities rather than conceptualizing their differences as "conflict.") Long-established practices and a certain kind of prestige seem to be endangered. But the conflict involved is between two kinds of technology, two ways of making written language available to readers, not two different versions of "literary culture." Faulkner will continue to be Faulkner whether he's read on slices of paper wedged between pieces of cardboard or on some now-unimagined variation of a "screen" in an e-book. Literary criticism will still be judged by the quality of its insights rather than the nature of the medium in which it appears. Although "Mr. James has mixed feelings about the shift from page to screen, especially about the concomitant decline in literacy" (as if the act of making this shift itself marks an immediate "decline in literacy"), I think he and everyone else should stop fretting about it. Those who are interested in reading Elias Canetti, or Pushkin, or Philip Roth (all three the subjects of essays featured on Mr. James's site) will continue to pursue that interest, however these writers are presented to us, and those who are not are just as "illiterate" in the era of print as they will be in the era of cyberspace.